The current solution for playing MP3's on the iLiad is far from ideal. So I started to look at other options. XMMS takes me back to the days of the old WinAmp. It's clean, it's simple, and it's GTK based.

It runs. I can't seem to get it to play mp3's just yet. But here's a teaser...

Don't know anything about this... but just to make sure that you know: There is a working MP3 player for iliad, madplay. Perhaps you could get some hints by looking at its source code? Check the forums if you didn't know about this.

No, no Amazon wishlist. I don't really care for donations either... I'm just happy to be providing iLiad users with software that'll really use the power of this device. I'd like to see those sony people look up words in a dictionary. Besides, all of this helps with my paperless life goal.

Adam B. has taken Scotty's place as Iliad developer...a real pity that iRex took so long to release the full sources.

Just imagine what Adam AND Scotty could have done...

I wouldn't go that far... Scotty did a lot of coding and improvements. I can make minor tweaks, and put together the necessary libraries to compile software for the iLiad. I'm just an enthusiastic Linux geek who loves his iLiad. I'm not much of a developer. That being said, I do appreciate the kind words. I'm just glad to give back.

After fighting with XMMS for a while, I've decided to give up on it. The interface isn't really all that good on a screen like the iliad's, and I could never get it to actually play anything.

So I started to think about other linux MP3 players, and came to the iPod Linux project. I have this on my ipod, and it uses a program called MPD (http://www.musicpd.org/) to play music. It's a very lightweight daemon that runs in the background that provides all of the music functions. Best of all, it support *many* different front end clients. http://www.musicpd.org/clients.shtml

I've got MPD compiled and working. It hardly uses any resources while it's running and playing. Best of all, because it's a background process, it can keep playing while you read a book or take notes.

My biggest obstacle at this point is finding a suitable front end client. There are a few GTK based applications, however they all require libglade. The one that I think would work the best, is Gimmix (http://gimmix.berlios.de/screenshots.php). All of the gtk based clients will compile fine, but when I try to run them from the iLiad, they complain of a “undefined symbol: g_object_ref_sink in libglade-2.0.so.0” I’ve downloaded the newest version of libglade, installed it, used the updated library, and the problem still exists. Solving this would make my life much easier…

There are a few other clients that use python. I started work on porting python, but forgot my iLiad at home today. I’ll keep you guys posted.